The overwhelming victory of Mwai Kibaki (seeBiographies) and the National Rainbow Coalition in the presidential and parliamentary elections in December 2002 encouraged aid agencies to renew their offers of assistance in 2003. The new government immediately implemented its election promise to offer free primary education to all (the cost would be paid from tax income). The gesture met with such an enthusiastic response, however, that classrooms were overcrowded and there were not enough teachers to cope with the influx of students. Nor was the government able to fulfill its promise to respond to the teachers’ demand for higher salaries within the previously agreed-upon 100-day time frame.

Kibaki was also determined to tackle the corruption that had ruined the country’s economy and had resulted in the withdrawal of foreign aid. Early in January two anticorruption courts were established, and two anticorruption bills were prepared for parliamentary debate. In February Kibaki suspended Chief Justice Bernard Chunga and appointed a tribunal to investigate Chunga’s conduct while in office, and on March 19 a committee was appointed to investigate the integrity of the judiciary as a whole.

The government’s good intentions were met with obstacles, however. The anticorruption bills had to be withdrawn when MPs threatened to vote against them. MPs also demanded a 20% increase in their salaries and substantial grants to enable them to purchase cars—as a disincentive, they maintained, to corruption and the taking of bribes. Many observers believed that the new minister of finance, David Mwiraria, would have become powerless in the face of the threat to block any further government legislation if he had failed to comply.

In addition, there were complaints that measures proposed by a commission in 2002 to introduce the new constitution had been slow to materialize. There was also pressure to appoint an executive prime minister to serve as a check on the power of the president. Much of this discontent sprang from personal ambition and ethnic rivalry between members of the coalition, some of whom claimed that too many important offices were being awarded to the Kikuyu inhabitants of the Mount Kenya district, who were closely linked with President Kibaki.

The problem of cabinet appointments was exacerbated when Vice Pres. Michael Kijana Wamalwa died in August. The appointment of Wamalwa, a Luhya from western Kenya, had symbolized the interethnic character of the government, and some feared that the balance might not be maintained. The murder in September of Crispin Odhiambo Mbai, a leading figure in the campaign for a new constitution, then gave rise to additional fears over the revival of the government practice of forcibly silencing critics, as had been witnessed during the presidency of Daniel arap Moi. In September Moi resigned as chairman of the Kenya African National Union.

Despite these difficulties and criticism from opposition parties, Kibaki continued to pursue his anticorruption campaign. He suspended 6 of the 9 Appeal Court judges and 17 of the 36 High Court judges for alleged corruption, and in October two tribunals began investigating them.

Political rivalries were not the government’s only problem. The agricultural sector of the economy remained depressed; world prices for primary produce remained at a low level. At the same time, the euphoria that had greeted the early actions of the new government resulted in a marked appreciation in the value of the Kenya shilling, a development that added to the problems of exporters. Fears of terrorist action also seriously affected income from tourism when in May both the U.K. and the U.S. governments temporarily discouraged their citizens from traveling to Kenya. To this catalog of difficulties, nature added its quota when heavy rains in western Kenya in May caused flooding that killed more than 40 people and displaced 60,000.